The murderous Chanukah attack at Bondi Beach should not have happened.
That statement is not merely moral. It is philosophical.
One of the dominant assumptions of modern Western thought is that history is moving, more or less inevitably, toward justice, tolerance, and moral enlightenment. Under that framework, acts of naked antisemitic violence are predicted to be fading into irrelevance. They are relics of a less educated, less inclusive, less enlightened past. When they occur at all, they are assumed to be marginal, residual, or explicable as temporary aberrations.
Bondi Beach is therefore not just a tragedy. It is a refutation of a specific belief: that history itself is doing the moral work for us.
This belief has become accepted as fact in the Western world. And that is dangerous.
Teleology is the belief that history has an inherent direction and an endpoint: that events are not merely unfolding, but unfolding toward something. In religious traditions, that “something” is redemption, salvation, or divine judgment. In modern secular thought, God is removed, but the structure remains.
Beginning in the Enlightenment, a range of philosophers secularized this idea. History was no longer guided by divine will but by impersonal forces: reason, science, economic laws, technological development, or moral awakening. The destination remained moral improvement; only the engine changed.
This secular teleology appears in multiple modern forms. In Marxism, history inevitably culminates in a classless society. With scientific or technocratic optimism, knowledge and innovation will dissolve moral conflict. Progressivism says social norms converge toward justice over time. Decolonial and liberation frameworks claim historical forces guarantee emancipation.
What these systems share is not policy content, but structure: history is treated as a moral agent, and the future as a validator of truth.
What is striking about secular teleology is not that it hopes for progress, but that it asserts inevitability. There is no historical law demonstrating that societies must become more just. There is no empirical data showing that hatred naturally declines with education (recent studies show the opposite.) We have no scientific principle proving or even suggesting that moral norms converge over time rather than fracture, mutate, or regress.
None of this is to deny that many things are better today than in the past. Local improvements exist. Institutional reforms can work. But inevitability is a faith claim, not a finding. It is asserted, not demonstrated. Once inevitability is assumed, evidence no longer tests the theory; it is absorbed by it.
Despite its lack of necessity, secular teleology has become ambient in modern Western thinking.
We speak casually about “the right side of history.” We assume that moral disagreement is generational rather than substantive. We expect that today’s taboos will expand tomorrow, and that yesterday’s hatreds cannot seriously return. We have inherited a narrative - in education, in media, in political speech - that simply has no factual basis.
It is a narrative about how time works. And time doesn’t really care about inevitable social justice.
